The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail Classics)

by Fernando Pessoa

Richard Zenith (Translator)

A modernist masterwork that has now taken on a similar iconic status to Ulysses, The Trial or In Search of Lost Time, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is edited and translated with an introduction by Richard Zenith in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist,' - so claimed Alvaro de Campos, one of the 'heteronyms', fully-realised substitute personalities invented by Fernando Pessoa to spare himself the trouble of living real life. In this extraordinary book, the putative 'factless autobiography' of an accountant named Bernardo Soares, Fernando Pessoa explores and dismantles the nature of memory, identity, time and narrative, creating one of the greatest - but also the strangest - modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes-linked fragments, The Book of Disquiet is a mesmerising, haunting 'novel' without parallel in any other culture.

This edition includes notes on the reconstruction of the text, appendices containing material omitted from the final version and letters which Pessoa intended to incorporate into the text. This edition also includes a table of the 'heteronyms' used by Pessoa in his writing.

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) was born in Lisbon and brought up in Durban, South Africa. A prolific writer, ascribing his work to a variety of personas or 'heteronyms', Pessoa published little in his lifetime. Although acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognised until after his death.

If you enjoyed The Book of Disquiet, you might like Finnegan's Wake, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'One of the twentieth century's greatest literary talents ... This superb edition of The Book of Disquiet is ... a masterpiece'
John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph

'Must rank as the supreme assault on authorship in modern European literature'
John Gray, New Statesman

'Portugal's greatest modern poet ... deals with the only important question in the world, not less important because it is unanswerable: What am I?'
Anthony Burgess, Observer

• ISBN10: 0141183047
• ISBN13: 9780141183046
• Publish Date: 30 May 2002 (first published 28 May 1991)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 31 October 2015
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Penguin Classics
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 544
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780141183046

Reviews

[brokentune]

DNF.

God, this was awful.

I wanted to punch that hateful little shit of a narrator/main character on the nose within the first ten pages of the book.

I get that the cynicism is an expression of the guy's struggle to find something to value in his life, but that doesn't make him a metaphor of the modern literary hero or indeed anything I can value.

Apparently, a lot of people have found some deep insights in his ramblings. Good on them. To me, the narrator's (or Pessoa's??) ignorant, arrogant, disdainful stream-of-consciousness blether held more cliches than a piece of hackneyed journalism, signifying nothing.

And if the intro to the book is correct and the MC is an alter ego of Pessoa himslef (who hadn't actually published this in his lifetime), then that is rather sad.